How to Mine Grin Coin with GrinGoldMiner - Step by Step Guide

Hello Everyone! At approximately16:01 UTC 15/1/2018,the very much hyped MimbleWimble protocol enabled privacy coin Grin coin was launched. Since then, miners all around the world have been asking the same question: “How do I mine some Grins?” and today we’ll be covering some of the basics of mining Grin on Windows 10 with NVIDIA GPUs.

A step by step run down will be given and if you follow them, you should be able to mine just fine and leave with a Grin 😀 on your face.

What is Grin?

Inshort - Grin is a privacy coin that uses the MimbleWimble protocol and runs on the Cuckoo Proof of Work (PoW) cycle and is designed to be hard onmemory, requiring miners to have cards with high memory capacity (eg. Nvidia 1070/1080 with 8gb vram). Also, Cuckoo PoW has 2 modes - c29 which favors GPUs, and c31 which favors ASICs. In this guide we will be focusing on c29 for GPUs as the ASICs have yet to be released.

What do I need to mine Grin?

Note that it is not an exhaustive list, but if you have the cards above it should work.

Software
1. Miner tools - See Step 1 below.
2. Overclocking tool - MSI Afterburner works fine to limit power and temperature (this is VERY important to protect your mining cards and optimize returns!)
3. Tested configuration - Power: 65% - 75%, Temp Limit: 70­°C, Core: +100, Memory: +300; These are settings that has been stable for myself across 1070ti - 1080tis and where I am, ambient temperature is around 28­°C so do adjust your settings lower/higher as needed.

Alright, let’s get started!

Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Grin Mining

Step 1: Downloading a miner

In this guide, I will only be covering GrinGoldMiner (GGM), which has been used since the testnet times to mine, and has been stable for me with no crashes, however do experiment around yourself to see what works. Download here (Reminder: ONLY download from official Github Sources!).

Other miners to choose from (untested by myself at time of writing, but others have used them with varied success rates):

Step 2: Choose a pool!

Note (25/1/2019): F2Pool (40%), Grinmint (16%), Sparkpool (25%) and Pool.BTC (16%) combined have about 97% of Grin network's graphrate - it is highly recommended that you try out different pools to distribute the graphrates more evenly. There also appears to be ongoing effort in Grin's official Discord calling for better graphrate distribution.

Check out the list of pools available along with its hashrate distribution here. For the purpose of this guide, I will be sharing my experience with pools I have personally tried:

Grinmint (0% fee) - Pool is smooth and work reported is consistent between client/pool side. Payouts received fine in the form of email payouts (payout guide).

F2pool (3% fee) - Pool is smooth and work reported is consistent between client/pool side. I have received payouts just fine directly to exchanges.

Sparkpool (1% fee) - Pool is smooth and work reported is consistent between client/pool side. I have received my payouts just fine directly to exchanges as well.

If you’ve followed all the steps to this point, you’re done with 90% of the work. Just sit back and relax now! DO note that all mined Grins take approximately 24 hours (1440 blocks) to mature, so you’ll have wait a little for them sweet payouts!

The other 10% of the work? Withdrawing them! Each pool/exchange has a slightly different process so that’ll be a separate article - stay tuned!

What is the development like on ASICs for Grin?

Where can I buy/sell Grin?

You can sell your mined Grin on one of the Grin exchanges. That being said, each pool has their own integration with exchanges to facilitate easy withdrawal. Pick the exchange that has the best volume and best reputation.

About Teh Sze Jin —
Jin is a Market Research Analyst at CoinGecko. In his free time, Jin enjoys messing with crypto related stuffs on a slightly technical side and generally learns about crypto as he munches on snacks.

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